Siri Hacked to Control Philips HUE Connected Lighting System

At some point in the future, you’ll be able to simply ask for your lights to be turned off an they will. Actually, that could be sooner than expected. Developer Brandon Evans (via The Loop, Cult of Mac) has come up with a neat way to control his Phillips HUE lights via Siri, and while it does involve quite advanced dev knowledge, it’s something we could see simplified in the future.

This isn’t for the faint hearted though. Evans explains:

The first thing that I wanted to do with the Hue bulbs is get them working with Siri. I had seen last year someone created SiriProxy (in Ruby, luckily for me), and that it should allow me to do this. I’m actually using the The-Three-Little-Pigs fork as it has active developers, although I’ll continue to just call it SiriProxy. The other part of making this work was the Hue API. Philips has said that they want to release an SDK at some point, however quite a fewpeople have sniffed the API already and gained almost full control of the system.

The code has also been uploaded to GitHub, so if you fancy having a crack at it, go ahead.

It certainly shows that with some tinkering, Siri can be put to a wide range of uses. Having said that, the HUE lights are incredibly expensive ($199 for the starter pack), so we’ll have to wait for a more affordable alternative.

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J. Glenn Künzler

Glenn is Managing Editor at MacTrast, and has been using a Mac since he bought his first MacBook Pro in 2006. Now he's up to his neck in Apple, and owns an old iBook, a 2012 iMac with an extra Thunderbolt display for good measure, a 4th-generation iPad, an iPad mini, 2 iPhones, and a Mac Mini that lives at the neighbor's house. He lives in a small town in Utah, enjoys bacon more than you can possibly imagine, and is severely addicted to pie.